Immonen had called his lily-headed AI Hoitaja, the Finnish word for nurse or custodian. She had a soft voice, and when she had explained to him what the menu was capable of after hours of his questioning, he had wept.

He had taken the Healing (Tactile) skill at once. It was limited by touch, unlike other healing skills, but it was also more powerful as a result. He had gone into the children’s cancer ward at his hospital late at night without telling anyone. He didn’t dare get anybody’s hopes up, least of all the kids. If it didn’t work, only he would be devastated.

His Body Analysis skill found the tumors at once in the frail little six-year old as he laid his hand on her forehead. Her name was Ida, and her bald head looked far too large for her tiny, skeletal figure. The tumors were along her spine, leeching the life out of her and mangling her spinal cord.

Immonen always thought the cancerous growths on the scans they took looked evil, like tiny misshapen demons attempting a possession. That wasn’t very professional, just a hold-over from his days in church.

“Please, God,” Immonen said his first prayer since his parents’ funeral, and applied his skill.

Ida never moved, and it only took a moment. A handful of seconds, and his Body Analysis skill told him the tumors were gone. The cancer utterly obliterated.

“No,” Immonen had said and drawn his hand back. It was too easy. Too easy by far. It couldn’t be just that.

“Doctor?” a sleepy voice asked from another bed. A 12-year-old suffering from lung cancer. Prognosis was bad and she wasn’t expected to last more than another year or two.

“Shhh,” Immonen said and approached her bedside. “I’m just checking on you. How are you feeling?”

He laid his hand very gently on her forearm. Body Analysis confirmed her cancer was there, a tingle of his skill, and then it was gone. Two seconds. Immonen still couldn’t believe it. He would not allow himself to accept it until he could confirm it with others. He could just be having some kind of fit or psychotic break from the stress. He was only human.

“Thirsty,” the girl said. Immonen poured her a glass and stayed until she had finished it. “Do I have tests tomorrow?”

Immonen checked the chart at the foot of her bed. “You do.”

“I don’t like the tests,” she said.

“I know, but they will help you get better.” It was an old lie. A lie he had told too many times to too many children. He didn’t even need to think of it any more. It came up to his lips and out, unbidden. The tests would help their research, maybe help future children, but for those at such advanced stages it was of little practical help to the victims. “Go back to sleep now. You need rest.”

“G’night Doctor Im,” the girl said. He smiled at her. Before he left that night he visited every child’s bedside in the ward. Two seconds at each, no more. That was all his new skills told him it took. So easy.

Too easy.

He had gone home and had nightmares of hurting the children and making them cry. That he was a madman rampaging through the hospital spreading sickness. He woke early soaked in so much sweat his first thought was that he had pissed himself.

He went into work early and arrived to chaos on the ward.

“Something is different with the children,” one of the nurses said. Immonen flashed back to his nightmare and shoved past one of the nurses at the sound of a child screaming.

Except it wasn’t a scream.

It was a boy, laughing, his mouth stuffed with scrambled eggs and sausages. The boy had been diagnosed with Stage-4 stomach cancer. Eating caused him immense pain, nausea, and he hadn’t been able to keep solid foods down for a while.

And now he was giggling around a mouthful of food and demanding thirds. The other boys from the room were likewise laughing and shoving their plates at him and chanting “Eat! Eat! Eat!”

Last night they had been thin and pale, two of them entirely bald from their treatments.

Now, they were still thin, but their color was back and the two bald boys had dark peach fuzz growth sprouting from their crowns.

“They were like this when they woke up, said they want to go out,” the nurse said.

“Little Ida’s tests came back negative. Again,” Dr. Harkonen said as he limped towards the crowd of nurses and orderlies, his cane leading the way. He was the director of the hospital, not one to come down to the ward too often.

“What?” Immonen asked. His face had gone entirely numb and he felt on the verge of tipping over.

“One of your patients. Ida. Spinal tumors. Non-responsive to treatment. Effectively paralyzed. The nurse found her walking around her room this morning. We ran her through the MRI three times. No tumors. Not one. Not a trace of a damn thing wrong with her, aside from some under-developed muscles. They should be atrophied entirely but they’re perfectly functional, just small.”

“Oh. Oh,” Immonen said and his vision swam. He reached a hand out to balance himself on the nearby counter and let out a hysterical giggle before clapping his hand over his mouth.

“Immonen? Garreth are you all right?” Harkonen asked. Immonen didn’t answer. He had to make sure. He had to see for himself. He reached out and touched Harkonen’s left knee, the one he had shattered years ago in a climbing accident. Body Analysis showed him a somewhat malformed kneecap with missing and weak tendons. Healing (Tactile) tingled and then Body Analysis told him there was just a perfectly normal, healthy kneecap under Harkonen’s slacks.

“You tell me, Doctor. Are you all right? How’s the knee?” Immonen asked.

“What do you——?” Harkonen asked and then blinked and looked down. His cane fell to the floor and Harkonen’s eyes widened as he stretched his leg out. “What?”

“Is it real? Please, tell me, tell me it’s real,” Immonen said.

“My knee. What did you do to it? How in God’s name?”

“Is it fine?” Immonen grabbed Harkonen’s white coat lapels and pulled him forward.

“Yes! God man, yes! It’s better than ever. What is going on here? Did——” Harkonen’s eyes widened as he looked down at his knee, at Immonen, then at all the rooms full of laughing children and smiling but confused nurses.

“I have to go,” Immonen said and grinned. “I have…patients. So, so many.”

“Go. Go,” Harkonen replied in a stunned whisper.

Immonen went.

He had done his best since then to do as much good as possible while keeping as far away from the aliens as he could. Any engagement with them at this point had seemed like a bad idea, not only because he wasn’t geared for combat, because the news told him of the amount of collateral damage such engagements caused. His chrome egg craft and ability to phase through most solid matter and conceal his presence had helped him avoid conflict as needed.

But the aliens couldn’t be ignored either, and he couldn’t just run forever.

If other hosts could fight, he could help prevent any permanent damage to innocents.

Except…

He had known as soon as he had seen the amount of blood on the office floor. Nobody could lose that much and live, and he was already far too aware of the fact that his powers could do nothing for the dead.

He had scoured the office for survivors and almost run headlong into the alien. If it hadn’t been for Hoitaja whispering constant menu updates in his ear, he might have gotten himself killed.

“Doctor, the alien is here!” his AI had hissed at him. There was a faint clip-clopping of tiny hooves and then a copy machine walking on dozens of goat feet had appeared from around a corner. Immonen phased back through the wall he had come through and almost ran into Samaira.

And then the fight had started.

If he could just touch its flesh, he could knock it unconscious, or hoped he could. It was an alien after all, but he could analyze its body, target whatever chemical vulnerabilities it had, and overload the creature enough to sedate it at least for a few seconds. More than enough time for Samaira to finish it off.

The tiger and the robotic centaur were keeping their doppelgangers busy, but Immonen had even less room to make a move. The copy machine had almost spotted him during his previous attempts to touch it, and that had been with Samaira and her cat and the robot distracting it.

“Doc! If you can hear me, get down!” Samaira shouted. She had created a magic lance that crackled with raw energy and made the air around it throb. The copy machine spat out a number of those attack-canceling papers and Immomen phased through the nearest wall just as Samaira released her arrow.

The resulting explosion shook the entire building, and Immonen heard all of the windows shatter outside. The walls creaked and he was thrown forward. He phased through a desk that rose to smash his face in as the room shuddered, and then phased back through the wall into the main office when things quieted.

The tiger——Chandra-something?——was in a heap in a corner, her white fur singed. A huge blue splatter mark coated the wall, floor and ceiling near her. The centaur-robot was on its side and its mechanical limbs twitched and sparked. Samaira was on her hands and knees, her sparkling hair in her face, back heaving as she gasped for air. The fingers of her white gloves had burned off somehow, maybe from channeling all that energy.

The copy machine was on its back, its tiny goat hooves scrabbling at the air as it tried to right itself. Almost all of its strange, chitinous armor had been cracked, if not torn off outright. The squirming pale flesh beneath glistened with spilled inky blood.

Samaira collapsed to the ground with a gasp and a thud and Immonen’s first reaction was to run to her and repair any damage.

But the copy machine bellowed a mechanical, warbled bleat and he knew healing Samaira now would be suicide. He dove at the copy machine and slapped his hand onto its repulsive flesh.

His Obfuscate Presence skill was good for being ignored, but useless if he made contact directly. His Body Analysis skill was already working, already giving him a detailed picture of the creature’s insides.

All Immonen’s adult life, he had studied the body. It was a beautiful machine, perfectly designed for its functions and a host of delightful contradictions. So sturdy and capable of astounding recovery, but just as fragile and prone to harm; such simple elegance in its organic mechanisms, but such depths of complexity and mystery still to be studied. It was a marvel.

This…thing was a nightmare. It was a mess of strung together parts held in place by no discernible structure. It had elements of an insect, a goat, a human, some kind of organic bone circuits crackling with unknown energy. It should not be anything but a motionless lump of parts slowly rotting away, but it hummed with the most vibrant life Immonen had felt.

The life force, for lack of a better term, it did have was so foreign to Immonen that he almost jerked his hand away. He had used Body Analysis on hundreds of people, and directly felt terrible diseases and wounds within them. He had shaken hands with Pan the pangolin and Brody the shark and discreetly scanned them both. It had all had the same “glow” of life. It was weaker in sick and dying creatures and people, but it was still always there until their passing, where it just stopped, like a lightbulb dimming and eventually going out.

Whatever sort of life energy this creature had, it was wholly unlike anything on Earth. If life on Earth could be thought of as a strong lightbulb, this thing was some kind of UV light. It had plenty of energy coming out of it, but on a different wavelength.

And while this thought of different wavelengths of life would have been enough of a revelation, it was eclipsed almost at once. His Body Analysis skill only took a fraction of a second to scan an average-sized human, but now there was some kind of delay. He scanned the copy machine almost at once, but then his skill took another moment to inform him that it was still processing.

And Immonen was given an analysis of the other four aliens in and around the building. He knew their exact locations and level of injury, the same as if he’d scanned a singular entity. And his skill told him it was still working and then giving him data on an alien miles out to sea and swimming toward New York. And then another alien in New Hampshire and heading north. And another, and…

They’re all the same thing, Immonen thought. Body Analysis was still telling him it was scanning, as if each alien were just appendages from a gigantic whole. Barely a second had passed, but he couldn’t indulge his curiosity any longer. He focused on multiple organs inside the copy machine alien that acted as its control centers, and slowed them down as much as he could. It wasn’t enough to kill the alien——his Healing (Tactile) skill wasn’t capable of shutting anything down permanently——but it was plenty to make the copy machine cease its struggles and lie still. A creature pumping with as much adrenaline and other chemicals as the copy machine was would result in it having a seizure or heart attack, and Immonen was able to “cure” the creature into a more stable, restful state.

At least for the moment.

Immonen tried to use whatever force was connecting all the aliens to spread his forced sedative to all of them, but it wouldn’t travel. Whatever was linking the aliens wasn’t physical, and thus wouldn’t allow his tactile-based skill to transfer beyond what was right in front of him.

But it was enough.

Once Immonen was sure the copy machine was down, he rushed to Samaira and touched her bare shoulder. She was exhausted, and she had multiple hairline fractures in most of her bones. Immonen healed her and then checked on her tiger. The beast had multiple deep lacerations and some kind of poison that was acting as a paralytic and stiffening her muscles and slowing her central nervous system. Immonen sealed the cuts and purged the poison and then returned to Samaira. The centaur-bot was still twitching and sparking but there was nothing he could do for the machine.

“Doctor?” Samaira said as she stood up and blinked. She was physically better, but she was some kind of magic user. His skills were hazy when it came to the arcane, an aspect that both fascinated and irritated him.

“The alien is down, but not for long,” Immonen said and nodded at the copier. The building shook from below and Immonen knew from his body scan that two of the aliens were close together, fighting, and a third was outside and also engaging with somebody, and the fourth was several floors below but making a bee-line for them. And then there was that sixth alien out to sea but closing fast…

“Can you finish it?” Immonen asked.

“Channeled too much aether,” Samaira said. She still sounded weak, which Immonen didn’t understand. She was fine physically. All of her endurance should have been restored. “I need a minute.”

“I don’t think we have that,” Immonen said as the copy machine began to stir.

“Doc, get in!” a gruff voice said from outside the window. Gary’s truck slammed through the window and screeched to a halt and he threw the passenger door open as it did. “Samaira, you and your kitty get down to the street and don’t look back!”

“It’s still alive!” Samaira croaked at Gary as she mounted Chandrali and sprang out of the window towards the street below.

“And there’s a second one coming up right now, maybe two floors down,” Immonen said as he slammed the door shut behind him.

“How do you know that? My AI’s still having trouble pinning these bastards down,” Gary asked.

“I touched it, and they’re all linked and I saw all of them and…look it’s going to be here any second and the copy machine is getting back up!”

“Not for long it ain’t,” Gary said and then put his truck into reverse and rocketed back out of the building. The copy machine was just getting to its many cloven feet and a section of the floor bowed upward as another alien emerged. It resembled some kind of fat, bald dog with a human face and crooked glass teeth.

“Don’t look at the light,” Gary said and pulled a lever under the dashboard. The hood of the truck popped up a few inches, and there was a deep humming within the vehicle that made the seats vibrate.

“What is happening?” Immonen asked. Gary ignored him and touched the side of his glasses and they turned black to shield his eyes. Immonen caught a glimpse of the copy machine and the fat dog rushing toward them and then he put his hands over his eyes.

There was a loud OOOOOOOOOOMP sound as something shot away from the truck, and then a cacophonous cascade of crumbling and inhuman bleating, howling, and a great gasping noise as though all of the air was being pulled out of the atmosphere. The light from whatever-it-was was enough to still be glimpsed from behind Immonen’s eyelids and hands, but only for an instant.

“Okay, they’re gone,” Gary said.

“What?” Immonen asked and blinked.

The aliens were gone, but so was the upper third of 26 Federal Plaza. The building hadn’t been smashed. There was no debris or wreckage, it just stopped somewhere around the thirtieth floor.

“Oh god. Were there still people in there?” Immonen rasped.

“Building is clear of all human life down to floor twenty,” Gary said, then glanced at his control panel. The many lights flickered and then went dark. “Uh oh.”

“What…” Immonen said and then realized what the problem was. The truck had begun to fall.

“Temporary problem,” Gary said and tried to rev the engine. Immonen hadn’t had time to buckle up and he was lifted out of his seats as the truck plummeted. Immonen winced as he banged his head on the ceiling of the truck’s cab and was pressed against it.

“It’s okay, just give it a sec,” Gary said. Immonen stared at the ground outside getting closer by the microsecond. He couldn’t heal himself or anybody if he were dead, and he didn’t have anything that would help him survive a car dropped from almost forty-stories up.

Just as he was preparing himself for the end, the truck jerked and two beetle-shaped robots clutched the truck in their claws. Rockets poked out of their bulbous backs and the two insectile machines set Gary’s truck down gently with a thud.

Immonen thumped back into his seat with a grunt. His all-too-brief moment of relief vanished as he stared out the front window. An alien shaped like a fan sat in the center of a building tornado, surrounded bt whirling blades, and it was pulling Pan toward it. Samaira had already landed and fired a magical tether at Pan and was struggling to pull him back to safety.

“I told the beetle brothers here to be on standby if we ran outta power,” Gary said. “Now get in there and back-up Anya and Pan! Any surviving robots do the same!”

The two robots trundled forward, one to the building, and the other toward Samaira and Pan. The pangolin summoned a high wall and several golems that he and Samaira took cover behind at once.

Immonen recalled his brief contact with the copier alien and how it had connected him to the others. The fan was right in front of him, but there were two others in the building, presumably fighting Anya.

“Anya?” Immonen asked as he brought up his contacts menu.

No answer.

“Oh no,” Immonen said. Anya’s lifesign still appeared on his menu but if she wasn’t answering…

“Go get Anya,” Gary said as he pulled some jumper cables out from beneath his seat. An avian robot, another that looked like a giant crab, and one of the beetle bots were all rushing toward Samaira, Pan, and the fan alien. They had enough help. Only one of Gary’s robots was making its way toward Anya. Immonen nodded at Gary as the older man connected one end of the cables to his truck and then ran in the other direction.

Immonen sprinted toward the building as quickly as he could, dashing past the lumbering beetle-bot as he did. He obfuscated his presence as he hurried up the stairs, his AI giving him precise directions to Anya. The office hallways looked like they had been melted inside of a furnace, and several of the walls were missing entirely. At least it made Anya and the aliens easy to spot.

A floating carpet and a many-armed toilet loomed over her prone figure. Her right arm lie several yards away from her. Anya herself rested in a widening pool of blood and Immonen saw the hole in her chest from down the hall.

“Fuck you,” Anya said as the toilet raised three of its hands and gathered pink balls of energy into them.

Immonen had only put a few points into Obfuscate Presence, but he hoped it was enough. He dashed forward, then leapt the last several feet, his arms outstretched.

Time slowed to a crawl as one of the toilet’s hands turned toward him and aimed the pink orb at his face.

The toilet flexed its fingers and fired the blast of light at Immonen’s face.

The floor erupted beneath the toilet as Gary’s beetle-bot rocketed up from the lobby below. The toilet’s shot went wide past Immonen’s face, and he took the precious second the robot had given him. His hand closed around one of the toilet alien’s many wrists.

Immonen made every one of its muscles relax into uselessness and the many arms wilted like dead flower stems. The beetle-bot continued to soar up through the hole in the floor and lodged itself in the ceiling.

The rug rippled and its hairs shifted in a twisting pattern that Immonen looked away.

His contact with the copier alien earlier and the toilet now had given him some brief insight into the bodily make-ups of the aliens, and how their physical forms operated and the skills they employed. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to tell him that the rug had the ability to dull his senses somehow.

Immonen squinted his eyes shut and lashed his hand out. He slapped the rug and plunged his fingers through its coarse hair to touch the twisting spirals of brain-like tissue beneath. Both toilet and rug went still as Immonen forced their alien minds into a kind of hibernation as he had with the copy machine.

And like the copy machine, it wouldn’t last.

“D-doc?” Anya wheezed. Immonen seized her by the stump of her right arm and put his other hand over her chest.

“It’s okay,” he said, but the toilet had already started to raise one of its arms and the carpet fluttered weakly.

Immonen had cured all manner of illnesses and injuries since he had acquired Healing (Tactile). Big things like missing limbs or excessive scarring (as from massive burns) took a minute or two. But he realized everything he had really cured thus far had been normal injuries and maladies.

Anya’s arm was already almost fully regrown and back to normal, and so was the surface damage to her chest.

But the thing that had been blown of out her ribcage was another matter.

It was like a perpetual supernova housed within a heart made of multi-layered ultra-dense muscle. For the first time, Immonen felt himself becoming drained. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the toilet flop another two of its arms. The rug fluttered again and began to raise up into the air. Anya’s arm was back, but the supernova in her chest was only halfway done.

However, its healing process was speeding up, almost exponentially. The more he healed it the faster it healed itself. At first there had only been a tiny spark inside a half-formed cage of muscle, but now it was a blinding orb of light that made the air around it shimmer with heat and he was forced to draw away from it.

“God that fucking hurts,” Anya said, then grabbed a sparkling crystal that lay on the floor beside her. “I think I got it from here, Doc.”

Anya gripped the crystal in her fist and took a deep breath in. Her skin glowed beneath the surface, and the hole in her chest began to close even faster. The mysterious second heart flared with even more energy so a powerful beam of white light shone out of her chest for a second before it was covered by her regenerating bone, muscle, and skin.

Immonen collapsed onto his backside with a grunt. He couldn’t obfuscate himself anymore, couldn’t put the aliens back to sleep, and he certainly couldn’t heal any more serious injuries. Whatever that thing in Anya’s chest was, it was greedy for energy. More than that, it was downright ravenous.

The beetle-bot dislodged itself from the ceiling after several seconds of struggling and dropped its heavy bulk on the rug alien with a crack of concrete. The rug thrashed uselessly beneath the robot as it struggled to get free.

“Ugly ass rug!” Anya said and leapt at it with her hands ablaze. The rug burst into flames and thrashed beneath Anya and the bot as she ignited it. Its coarse hair was incinerated in less than a second and its cerebral flesh cooked to a crisp seconds later.

The toilet fully awoke and scrambled to its hands. It aimed one pink orb at Anya’s back and another at Immonen’s face.

Gary’s beetle-bot fired some kind of four-barreled pulse-rifle at it and the toilet was forced to bring up three glowing blue shields and back away. Its offensive hands were pushed aside by the shields at the last second and its shots went wild, cutting harmlessly into the walls and ceiling and floor.

Anya spun around as one of the beams passed next to her. She held the charred, crumbling remains of the rug alien in her hands and was grinding what was left of it to black dust. Her eyes glowed and flames jetted out of the corners of her mouth and nose as she breathed. She looked almost…ecstatic.

“Robot! Unload on this bastard!” Anya shouted at the robot, then blasted forward like a rocket and slammed into the toilet. The air around her shimmered and the arms from the toilet began to char and smoke and burst into flame. The hands struck and grasped at Anya but wherever it grabbed her the hands hissed and pulled away with fried, blistered skin.

“Time for me to go, I think,” Immonen muttered as he struggled to his feet. The beetle-bot turned from him and charged at the toilet, guns chattering away. Immonen hurried as much as his exhausted body would allow around and away from the fight and back toward the stairs.

The wind wasn’t just howling outside, it was screaming. The localized vortex had expanded into a full-blown tornado that had grown to encompass the entire block and more every second. The front of 26 Federal Plaza had been torn away by the winds and Immonen was forced to take cover behind a marble pillar.

Flashes of blue magical light burst within the tornado, the Earth rumbled, robotic weapons chattered and boomed, and orange and white flames roared overhead. The tumultuous winds were devouring more and more of the surrounding blocks and creating a lethal vortex of concrete, metal, glass, and cars.

And all he could do was hide, and wait, and pray the others would be all right.